Collected Agenda with Sophia June
Guest Edit #5
Drawing on the diary as a medium of both confessional interiority, and visceral engagement with the physical world - guest edits ask creative people to share What They Did and What You Should Do.
Introducing Sophia June: (Instagram ) (Language Arts)
Sophia June is a writer, editor, and freelance queen of nightlife in New York. I first read Sophia’s work during her time as Nylon’s Culture Writer - covering nightlife, books, and trends with wry humor, sharp analysis, and an eye towards spotlighting indie artists and authors.
More recently, Sophia co-founded the Substack Language Arts with Layla Halabian (previously Nylon’s Culture Editor). More on this in Document Journal. Language Arts is a Substack “about books you actually want to read with a focus on debut and underrepresented artists.” I like Sophia’s writing and taste because it is intellectually and creatively rigorous, and it is also on the pulse and fun. Some recent favorites from Language Arts include Secrets of a Book Publicist, Bitch For A Week, and Beckett Rosset’s Reading List.
Sophia June previously worked at the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in publications like Pitchfork, Vanity Fair, and her hometown paper Willamette Week. Her fiction has appeared in publications like Flaunt Magazine and TK Collective. She is currently working on a novel inspired by her work in New York nightlife.
WHAT SOPHIA JUNE DID
Monday, December 2
When I first started living alone three months ago, I had lofty goals. Wake up every morning and before anything: Dance. I’d play “Babyyy” by Grace Ives or anything by the Talking Heads and flail my arms around my mostly-empty living room. It made me understand religion, or exercise: an ecstasy available to me if I just dared to claim it every day. But then my Wellbutrin kicked in and now, I get up in the 90 sq- foot cave that is my room and paw my chipped nails at my phone.
Today, it is frigid and clear. I work from home on Mondays, so I stop for a coffee at the window of Gold Star Beer Counter before walking around the neighborhood and listening to a podcast about the JFK assassination. I scrape carbonara residue off from dinner last night and then eat a quesadilla and green smoothie for lunch, write copy for the apparel company I work for, and prepare tomorrow’s Language Arts post: a trailer for Allie Rowbottom’s new book Lovers XXX, before zooming with my therapist.
After all that business is done, I put on a Bushwick-meets-Clueless outfit and head to the East Village for a reading hosted by Miss Manhattan and Black Lipstick. Erik and Lizzy live on the block as the bar, which I haven’t been to since meeting up with someone off Instagram in the vaxed and waxed summer of 2021. I used my drink ticket to get a glass of white wine and chatted with Lydia Sviatoslavsky and Catherine Spino before the reading began.
I love being in front of people, so don’t get nervous about that part of a reading, but I am terrified that my writing won’t fit the vibe, that people will be experiencing secondhand embarrassment for me. Humiliating! Luckily, I go last — following excellent readings by Mila Jaroneic, Elizabeth Hawes, Rachel Gilman, Joseph Lezza, and Elizabeth Burch-Hudson — and the crowd is sufficiently warmed up, and more importantly: knows how to LAUGH. I read an essay about an obsession with the ex-girlfriend of a guy I dated (who among us hasn’t…) and afterwards, Erik, Lizzy, Sarah, Keely, Conor, Spice and I go to Tile Bar, where Sarah had brought a frozen turkey the week before, when she hit the bar the night before hosting us for Thanksgiving. I relay my horror stories from working the door at the night club, about the fight I saw and girl who tried to use a fake ID to get in and when she was rejected, said: “What if I were to tell you I’m on ‘The Voice’ this season and sing like an angel?” We talk about what it means to split the “G” and foot fetishes and about the time when a beautiful strawberry blonde 16-year-old gave Sarah and I such a dirty look that she might as well have just called us “old hags.” We leave the bar at 11 and Conor and I consider hitting Lucien, but instead take a car home and I make us grilled cheese sandwiches.
Tuesday, December 3
I cosplay 2019, when I had first moved to New York, took the train to the New York Times building and ate alone in Bryant Park every day.
I take the train to Midtown for my copywriting day job and eat slop food for lunch (Sweetgreen custom bowl). I read Good Girl, Aria Aber’s sexy coming of age debut, on the train, which makes me think of the three weeks I spent in Berlin last summer. I long for it, even Berlin in December, which makes me think of the Pacific Northwest, where I grew up. I finish my little copywriting tasks, then do some freelance work for a Moroccan rug company and research for a new book by Amanda Holden about investing. I hate working in an office because it’s harder to talk on the phone. I love chatting with my friend Matt Starr in particular, and when he is named one of T Magazine’s The Freaks Who Rule New York, I steel away to the garment closet to call to congratulate him. I talk a lot in the garment closet, moving my hand along sustainably-produced denim while taking calls that don’t pertain to this part of my life.
After work, I stop by a reading at Doyle Auctions House for Raymond Chandler featuring readings by Alissa Bennett, Grace Byron, John Ganz, and Megan Nolan. We drink gimlets and I chat with some of the only other young writers in attendance, mostly about our curiosity about who exactly would be at the Doyle Auction House and whether or not I’d write about it (I did, here.) I have to leave the reading early to go meet Conor and an out of town guest for dinner at Casino, where we drink espresso martinis, dirty gin martinis and amaro and eat steak frites. We fall asleep watching Friends on the couch.
Wednesday, Dec 4
Big day: Spotify Wrapped is released and a CEO is gunned down in Midtown by a hot Italian man, which despite being the epicentre of the most captivating news story since the submersible, is exactly the same. It always is. I eat a salad from Whole Foods, which I’ve been shoplifting from for the last six months. (Apparently they know. They always know, but don’t arrest you until you’ve wracked up $500 in stolen merchandise. All I do is occasionally take from the hot bar.) Anyway, I love Spotify Wrapped day because it’s the only day when people don’t lie on social media. I wrote a blog from the heart about this for Nylon a couple years ago, if you dare to dive into my obsession. Data really is so beautiful.
I leave work a little early to head to Pastis, which I haven't been to since I took myself on a solo vacation post breakup in the spring of 2021 where I printed out a copy of a memoir I will never publish. It was the first time I held the weight of everything I'd written then in my hands. Now it’s in a box I’ll never open, much like Raymond Chandler’s castaways. Now, I have a new manuscript, this time for a novel, this one which (hopefully) won’t have the same fate as the first.
We eat mussels and frites and then stop at Hotel Chelsea for a drink (they have a slept-on daiquiri) before heading back to Midtown to see Romeo + Juliet, the Broadway show starring Rachel Zeigler and some muscled 18-year-old who fans were screaming about after the show. I had a white wine and a beautiful buzz while enjoying the Jack Antonoff-scored Broadway cash grab that I forgive it for because 1) they keep the original script, Baz Luhrman-style and 2) It’s actually so good. The most shocking part of the day isn’t that Elliot Smith is on my Spotify Wrapped (not shocking at all) but that Conor and I go to the crepe place we always walk by on the way to his Chinatown apartment.
Thursday, Dec. 5
I get a coffee at Little Canal, which I take too close to my dose of buspirone, making me feel stimmed-out and dizzy. I coast the feeling all the way back to Brooklyn, where I spend too much time measuring my collection of vintage erotic posters and then scouring framing sites to find the best deal on approximately 15 frames. I moved into my first solo apartment in August (thanks to a rent-stabilized deal I inherited from my BFF) and now that I’ve finished the novel, I can start really settling in. One day you’re young and hot, the next you’re using your architect friend’s Design Within Reach trade discount and scouring Etsy for new cupboard handles. This life is new for me…I spent the last 2 years in bushwick, where the only thing I bought for my apartment was blackout curtains so I could still sleep when I got home from my bartending and coat check jobs at 4am.
Later, I meet my best friends Kim, Spice, Amelea and Sarah at the Saks Fifth Avenue holiday windows. We are obsessed with the Grinch (long story) and have a tradition to do something Christmas-y, like watching Serendipity or drinking frozen hot chocolate at Serendipity3. Tonight, we have a last-minute reservation at Pebble Bar thanks to a PR contact, and order martinis. Then, we attempt the impossible: a table for 5 in Manhattan with no reservation 3 weeks before Christmas. We discuss Bemelmans and Russian Samovar, attempt Monkey Bar and end up at PJ Clarke's, where we eat mac-and-cheese, steak, fries, oysters, and another round of martinis and we talk about everything, like we always do, and how lucky we are. Amelea and I visit the worst Subway station in the city (59th Street…a truly liminal space) and take the 4 home and I watch a couple episodes of Sex and the City before going to bed.
Friday, Dec. 6
I grab coffee with Elizabeth Burch-Hudson and Catherine Spino at my favorite coffee shop/bar The West (don’t sleep on the burrito!) and then meet Sierra and Rosie in Midtown to shop for Sierra’s wedding dress, an experience which I’ll redact here for the sanctimony of the bride. After, we grab lunch at a diner and stroll through the holiday market and Urban Outfitters. I buy her a mug that says “hot stuff” on with a handle resembling a bell pepper.
I go to a sculpt class at Y7 yoga (I always buy the classes 50% off!) and then head home to change quickly before Kim picks me up in an Uber. We try to get into Little Grenjai in Bed Stuy but they’re closed for a private event. We talk about how Bed Stuy is so different now from when I lived here two years ago. I lived off the Bedford-Nostrand G for three years and I’m prone to nostalgia, to feeling doubled over by any perceptible change even though everything is always changing (except Midtown). We walk to Come On Everybody and watch one of our favorite performers Macy Rodman do Lady Gaga (Part II). She’s perfect, nip slips and all and I’m particularly bent out of shape when she does a rendition of “Scheiße.” After, we grab a nightcap at Singers.
Saturday, Dec. 7
The week has been nonstop, and I'm excited to have a moment to relax. Usually I work coat check on the weekends, so it’s rare for me to have an entire weekend off, but I do have a lot of freelance work to do on the investing book. But I take my time: I read good girl in the am with coffee, take out my compost, get my brows threaded at the salon down the street, etc.
Layla texts me in the morning to plan our evening. We have dinner plans but both had late nights, so we decide to skip dinner and go straight to a publishing party in Bed-Stuy where we drink punch and scheme about how to make literary parties more fun. Our solution? A house party and a bathtub keg. (We’re accepting ideas.)
Sunday, Dec. 8
Steph comes over for breakfast and I give her a copy of In Tongues by Thomas Grattan, one of my favorite books of the year (2000s NYC coming-of-age gay panic book, no notes.) Conor and I go to The Nutcracker at the New York City Ballet with a group of his painter friends. I’m blown away: The dancing mice with their whipping tales, the gargantuan Christmas tree, the blinding blizzard. We eat gummy bears, drink Champagne and I beam the entire show. Not at all overrated, in fact, it’s underrated. After the ballet we go to the Empire Hotel and I drink a cosmo and eat a tiny burger with fries and mayonnaise. It’s only 9 when we leave, so Conor and I stop at Russian Samovar for borscht and beef stroganoff, which we eat while listening to a piano player clink out Russian runes. The horseradish martini, at this juncture, was a mistake. I drink about half before we take the train back to Brooklyn and fall asleep at 1, exhausted and so, so full.